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Abril Bustamante, left, and Skylar Caputo, right, have been dominating the beach volleyball circuit Monday, May 12, 2014, Hermosa Beach, CA. While the two have been teammates on the sand for years, they battle each other indoors as Bustamante goes to Redondo and Caputo to Mira Costa. ¬ Photo by Steve McCrank/Daily Breeze

Abril Bustamante, left, and Skylar Caputo, right, have been dominating the beach volleyball circuit Monday, May 12, 2014, Hermosa Beach, CA. While the two have been teammates on the sand for years, they battle each other indoors as Bustamante goes to Redondo and Caputo to Mira Costa. ¬ Photo by Steve McCrank/Daily Breeze

Soon, they’ll kick it up a notch when Skylar plays for Pepperdine and Abril for USC. But first things first.

Believe it or not, the longtime rivals just happen to be best friends and one of the hottest beach volleyball duos around. And they’re going to the Junior Olympics to show for it, which could mean a trip to the Summer Youth Olympics in Shanghai later this summer.

Wait, together?

“We’re really good friends,” Bustamante said with a smile, trying to explain how they keep their natural rivalry aside. “We both have the same goals and we’re pretty determined to work for what we want. I don’t know how it works out. I will cheer for Costa when she’s on it, unless we have to play each other.”

“We got really close this year,” Caputo said, “and we felt like our levels came together.”

Through the years playing with other partners, Caputo and Bustamante are two of the more accomplished players on the beach even if they are only finishing their junior years.

Bustamante won the AAU Junior Beast of the Beach, the Cal Cup, two under-16 events, and captured the USA Junior High Performance under-17 title, all with different partners. She won the Cal Cup with Caputo.

Last summer, Caputo teamed with Delaney Knudson, a future Pepperdine teammate, and captured ninth place in the Junior FIVB tournament in Porto, Portugal.

It was when they captured the Cal Cup that the duo thought: Hey, there just might be something going here.

“We trust each other and we have a lot of chemistry,” Bustamante said. “When she calls a ball I don’t hesitate, I don’t think twice. I know she’ll be there and I trust everything she does.

“We knew before we got together what our goals both were. We want to be the best in our age group and (higher) than our age group, too.”

They are part of a the changing landscape of volleyball, especially for girls. Now that Division I colleges are offering scholarships and playing for national championships in beach — ahem, “sand” — volleyball, the competition level has soared.

And choices have to be made sooner in life than they needed to be made. Both girls will still play indoors for their high school teams, but that’ll be it. They’ve quit their club indoor teams and it’s exclusively the beach thereafter, and Olympic gold is a dream they’ve grown up with.

And they’re fortunate to have access to premier coaching, not only with Nina Matthies at Pepperdine and Anna Collier at USC. The duo is being trained by the Elite Beach Volleyball club, which just happens to be run by legends Holly McPeak, Eric Fonoimoana and Barbra Fontana.

So as much talent as Caputo and Bustamante have, their growth will be expertly monitored.

“They need to get consistent with the basics then pushing strategies, then knowing how to win in certain situations, how to take things away from other players,” McPeak said. “Basically, a high-level team can still pick them apart just because of inexperience, but they’re gaining experience. They’re hungry, they love competing and I love to see that.

“When I was their age, there were no opponents among my peers. I had to enter pro events to get competition.

“I grew up in the beach volleyball culture, loved it, woke up to play every day without even the goal in mind of the Olympics. Now they have USA Hi Performance, they’re traveling nationally. … There are so many more opportunities to compete, more avenues to get good training and good competition that we never had. I went wherever I could to play with whomever I could.”

All Bustamante and Caputo have to do is go to Hermosa Beach to see their coaches. And they’re going to take advantage of it.

“All of them have coached at a high level,” Caputo said. “Each one of them has something new to say to us every practice.

“Abril and I feel like not only just us two, everyone that has been in the club training this year with them has gotten so much better. We’re just really lucky.”